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djotaku's twitter feed
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- just started playing WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos. http://raptr.com/djotaku
- video did NOT kill the radio star. Radio is still around. MTV, on the other hand, no longer plays music videos. RIP TRL.
- Yay MD for the $170 electric bill credit!
- @harajukuroxy that stinks. My mom used to get a lot of migraines.
- My latest computer animation: http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/dtbp/node/48
- My latest computer animation:
- Nearly done with my latest animation
- @minimoniotaku: the old momma joke was hilarious
- Using akmod-nvidia, built the latest drivers for nvidia and 3D works again! w00t w00t! Blender here I come!
- Dagnabbit. Nvidia doesn't support Xorg7.4pre so no Blender for me for a while
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Sep
18
The Current Financial Mess - We Never Should have ended up Here
Category: News, Politics, economics | 
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Today I was listening to Fresh Air on NPR. They had an economics guy on who’s now a professor at one of the University of Maryland campuses and was involved in Clinton’s economic team. (Although he didn’t always see eye to eye with Clinton’s treasury secretary) This guy put the current economic crisis in the best terms and framed it so well, I can’t believe that we’re in this mess. Those stupid jackasses on Wall Street “were betting that people who did not have money to pay their mortgage would pay their mortgage.” Just take a second and read that again. Yeah, pretty nutty, isn’t it? If people had just used their noggins we wouldn’t be in this mess. “Sure,” you might say, “hindsight is 20/20.” Yeah, but it doesn’t take hindsight to see that people who have bad credit probably aren’t going to pay their mortgage. Couple that with the fact that Wall Street swindled them into interest only loans and variable rate mortgages, and you HAD to see that a disaster was on the way. Again, they were betting that people who didn’t have the money to pay their mortgage would somehow pay their mortgage. Again, in their defense you might say, “but they thought housing prices were always going to go up.” And to that I say, WHEN has ANY market EVER gone up FOREVER? Hello! The tech bubble was just 10 years ago! Nothing ever goes up without an end. That’s just ridiculous. Sigh! Seriously, I don’t know how they let this happen. These guys all have degrees in finance. They should have known and done case studies on how whatever’s hot now won’t be hot in a few years. And then AIG freakin’ insures the mortgages of people with bad credit? I just can’t believe it!
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Mar
5
On a recent business flight I took, I noticed that my tray table had become an advertisement for cough drops
Also, a plane ticket, which I, regrettably, did not photograph, had an advertisement for Papa Johns Pizza. Has it come to this? Are the airlines so desperate for cash that they have resorted to selling ad space on their tray tables and tickets. Flying used to be a refined affair that people got dressed up for. Now we have the same airlines that charged us so much money without giving us any food to eat, advertising on the tray tables.
I think if they were clever they’d be advertising food since that’ll make you hungry and more likely to buy that crappy food they’re peddling now that you don’t even get a snack on most domestic flights. I’ve even heard that one airline is allowing food companies to offer product samples. Again, brilliant, if slightly disturbing. After all, you’re hungry and you can’t do anywhere. Why not try this free sample of product X.
I think our lives are become more and more bombarded by advertisements, both stealth and blatant. It’ll be interesting to see if this becomes and industry-wide standard.
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Aug
14
It’s the end of the world….
Category: Globalization, News, Technology | 11 Comments
Our sexually crazy and confused friends over in Japan have decided to contribute to the end of humanity with the Honey Doll (warning link contains some images/sounds NSFW) :
Unlike the blowup doll everyone makes fun of, the Honey Doll is supposed to mimic real women. It looks real (or creepily almost real) and has real feeling breasts - or so I assume from the pictures since I can’t understand Japanese. It also make real orgasm sounds. So for loser guys who might spend a little more time finding a real woman, I think they may give up. And then there’s the stereotypical guy that doesn’t want to have to deal with a real woman and all her problems and just wants to have sex. I think it’s roughly the end of humanity……
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Apr
13
It’s not World Bank Leader’s Fault…
Category: Financial, News, Politics, economics | Leave a Comment
It’s not Paul Wolfowitz’s fault that he used nepotism to give his girlfriend a job at the state department paying $200k a year. No, no…. You see, he told use yesterday why he did it - He was new to the bank and didn’t know that it was wrong. Of course! The World Bank obviously operated under different rules than the rest of the US Government where he worked for 24 years. But then again, he was one of the nut jobs that said invading Iraq was a good idea, so perhaps his judgment isn’t working so well.
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Mar
21
Tax Cuts Explained with a story
Category: Financial, News, Politics, Scott Adams, economics | Leave a Comment
Whenever one political party expresses wishes to give a fixed percentage tax cut to all Americans, the other party portrays it as tax cuts for the rich. (I’ve complained on this blog about this before) Their proof: the rich get back a few thousand bucks while the poor only get back a few hundred. The stupidity: if it’s a tax cut where everyone gets 1% off, and the rich people put more in, 1% of their money is more than 1% of the poor person’s money. Of course, they never dig deeply into it in the news and perhaps it’s a tax cut on Porches or something else that only rich people have. Somehow I doubt that or the other party would bring it up.
When I went over to Scott Adams’ blog, I found this perfect illustration in the comments.
Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:
The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.
So, that’s what they decided to do.
The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. “Since you are all such good customers,” he said, “I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20.”Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. What about the other six men, those paying the tab? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share?’
They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.
And so:
The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings. “I only got a dollar out of the $20,”declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man,” but he got $10!” “Yeah, that’s right,” exclaimed the fifth man. “I only saved a dollar, too. It’s unfair that he got ten times more than I!” “That’s true!!” shouted the seventh man. “Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!” “Wait a minute,” yelled the first four men in unison. “We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!”
The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.
The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn’t have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.
David R. Kamerschen, PhD
Professor of Economics
University of Georgia
Of course, on the internet anyone can claim to be anything, so I don’t know if this guy is really an econ professor. I don’t have the time to look for links now, but I’m SURE [if you're into technology as much as I am and browse the relevant news] you heard about the recent gaffe where a Wikipedian moderator was claiming to be a professor of religious studies and it turned out he was like an 18 year old who hadn’t even gone to college or something like that.
So, that said, if the above story is bogus mathematically or economically, go ahead and say so in the comments.
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Dec
7
MMORG and Real Economies Clash
Category: Computers, Financial, Geek Love, Video Games, economics | 2 Comments
As I was driving home last week, I heard something interesting on NPR. I knew that people had been selling their MMORG characters on Ebay. They would spend a few sleepless nights getting their character up to a really high level and then sell the character on Ebay to the highest bidder. I’ve heard stories of people making thousands of dollars! But this story on NPR took the cake! People were buying in-game money with their own real money. Of course, as the point was made in the story, our money is no more eral than the money in the game, if people have faith in its redemption value. Apparently there are websites which peg the US dollar to the Everquest Gold Piece! But that’s not all!
Apparently, there are now sweatshops in Southeasat Asia where people are paid $1 per hour to play these online games. Their job is to harvest as much in-game money as possible. Their overlord, typically a caucasian, takes this money and then puts it all together and sells it on Ebay or other sites for massive amounts of real-world dollars! The above link to the NPR news story has a graph with the exchange rate on World of Warcraft.
Personally, I feel this is like cheating because you’re basically playing the game via deus ex machina. In other words, it’s like the hand of god is giving your characters money because in the game they haven’t worked enough to actually earn that money. As a weak player you may think it’ll be more fun to be strong and be able to take on anyone, but on any game I’ve used cheatcodes, I usually find that the game becomes boring. What’s the point of romping around the world killing monsters if you don’t need the money or XP? At least, that’s how I feel about the topic.
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Nov
29
New Capitalism
Category: Financial, Globalization, News | Leave a Comment
With all of the job cuts being announced right before the holidays, I was wondering if it might be time for a new capitalism. Here’s a rhetorical question, what if the board lowered their salaries and the CEO’s salary instead of firing people? A typical CEO for these big companies like Delta makes a few million. He or she doesn’t need millions - no one does! Somewhere around $50k can allow someone to survive in the US. $100k is very comfortable depending on the housing market. Certainly, $500k could be enough to live VERY well, even in New York. Let’s say they are firing white collar workers who each make $50k. If the CEO were to lower his salary by just $500k, he could save 100 jobs! If we’re talking about people who make less money, even more jobs could be saved! So why can’t they do this? Well, obviously, no one would ever lower their own salary. But why isn’t there much of a public outcry? People are losing their jobs right before Christmas and these CEOs are flying around in private jets. I know we have even more ridiculous things like basketball players making millions, but I would assume that people would say stuff. For the first time today, I heard them say something on CNN this morning. Of course, it was 6 AM and no one was listening - it wasn’t repeated all day like their typical stories. I know it’s a bunch of BS, but I had to get this off my chest - it’s really been bothering me.
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Apr
6
If the world was a series of gas station….
Category: Books, Globalization, Politics, economics | Leave a Comment
I am coming to the end of the Lexus and The Olive Tree. In part three of his book, he had a very interesting analogy for the world’s economic systems. If they were a gas station….
Japan - the gas costs $5/gal, but there are five guys who service your car. They pump your gas, fill your tires, and clean your windshield. They are all guaranteed to have their jobs for life.
Europe - the gas also costs $5, but there is only one guy who is always telling you that his union contract says he only has to pump your gas, nothing else. He works 35 hours a week, gets 90 minutes for lunch and six weeks of vacation every summer. His uncle and cousin are across the street playing because they make more money on welfare than their last job.
Third world country - the gas costs $0.35, because it is subsidized by the government. Fifteen people work there and they are all cousins. Only one of the ten gas pumps work. The station is owned by a guy in Zurich who takes all the profit back to his own country. He never goes to the station and doesn’t know that many of the workers sleep in the garage and use the car wash to bathe in the morning.
Communism - the gas costs $0.15 cents, but there isn’t any in the pumps because two of the three workers are selling it on the black market. They still come in on Fridays to collect their paycheck.
US - the gas costs $1 and you have to do everything by yourself. But you are in charge. You can pump gas or wipe your windshield or do as you wish.
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Mar
31
I’m still listening to The Lexus and the Olive Tree, which I mentioned back back on 12 March, since it’s a massive 21 hour book. Today I heard what I consider to be one of the most interesting theories involving wars. The author of the book noticed that no two countries containing a McDonald’s in their borders had ever fought. In other words, if Country A and Country B both have a McDonald’s they won’t fight each other. If Country C didn’t have a McDonald’s, then it may be attacked by either Country A or Country B, or it may attack either of these countries. His main exclusion to this theory is that a Civil war doesn’t count, so the problems in Yugoslavia don’t disprove the theory. The author then took his theory to McDonald’s who then independently verified that no two countries containing a McDonald’s had ever attacked each other.
What does this mean? Is it just a coincidence that no two McDonald’s countries had ever fought? The author explains himself this way: McDonald’s is just a representation of a country achieving a critical mass of middle class citizens. Poor people can’t afford to eat McDonald’s often enough and rich people would probably eat higher quality food. Therefore, a McDonald’s franchise would only open up in a country with an entrenched middle class. As a generalization, countries with a large middle class are averse to war. They know that wars are increasingly devasting to even the victor.
A country’s economy cannot support an indefinite war (present Iraq conflic aside) and sooner or later the middle class will begin to complain to its officials to end the war. Additionally, when countries go to war, the uncertainty drives away investors and they take away their money with them. Therefore, it is in a country’s best financial interest to stay away from wars.
Although I would like to wholly believe the author of the book, his theory sounds eerily like two men he mentions in the book. These were both people who said in 1910 that war was over and there would never be another war again. Countries were too tied up in economics to wage wars and it would be devastating for both sides. Within just four years of that statement would be the first World War and more would die in that conflict than in all the wars before it. In fact, the men were right, the war decimated the European continent and its countries. Coupled with World War 2, Europe was left behind until very recently, allowing the US to become a world leader. I agree with the author of the book I’m listening to that it would be very chaotic if there were to be another world war. However, I am not so sure that the implication could be made that there would never be another world war.
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Mar
12
How Thailand’s crisis became the World’s Crisis
Category: Financial, Globalization, economics | 2 Comments
I recently began listening to an unabridged version of The Lexus and The Olive Tree and I must say that after about ten minutes of listening to the book, I’m quite disconcerted over the increasing connectedness of countries and their ability to affect each other. Allow me to illustrate this by paraphrasing the book’s opening story.
In 1998 the Thai government had been keeping the currency, Boht, valued at one US dollar. Banks and investment first in Thailand therefore were borrowing money from US banks for their ventures since US banks were much more stable. In August of 1998 the Thai government, for whatever reason, decided to no longer tie the values of the two currencies and the Boht fell to 30 Boht for 1 US dollar. The Thai banks now had to come up with a lot more money to pay back their loans to the US banks. A short time later, 56 of Thailand’s 58 major banks closed down. Over 20 thousand white collar workers in Thailand lost their jobs. Foreign investors began removing their money from developing Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand, South Korea, and others. This would have only caused an asian recession except for the ties to Russia.
Russia was in quite a bad place in 1998. Most of the products domestically produced were actually negative valued goods. As the book explains it, “this means that a Russian made tractor was actually worth less when it was made. It would have been more valuable to the Russian government if it was made into scrap or never made at all.” The few successful firms in Russia were dodging taxes. Therefore Russia had two major sources of income: selling oil and other raw materials and selling government bonds. The bulk of their raw materials had been input into Southeast Asian countries which took the raw product and converted it into Tvs, radios, and other finished products they exported to other countries. As they went into recession they bought less and less raw product from Russia. In order to entice people to invest in their government bonds, Russia had been offering ridiculous interest rates of nearly 50%. Thus American banks were borrowing money from other American banks at 5% interest, investing it in Russian bonds, and making a fortune. That is to say, they were making a fortune until Russia decided to default on their bonds. Basically, they told all the investors they were SOL.
This moved the problem over the America where the banks which had borrowed money at 5% expecting a 50% return now had to pay back that money with 0% return. They began to sell the bonds they had in good countries to pay off their debts. This transmitted the problem to countries like Brazil which had done nothing wrong, but suddenly saw people dropping the stocks and bonds in their country. Desperate for investment, they began to offer crazy interest rates too.
Investors, hungry for a safe investment, began to invest wildly in the US, driving interest rates low. This caused banks to panic, fearing that Americans would pay off their home loans early, cutting off an important source of income for them. Meanwhile, oil prices were dropping, bad news for Middle Eastern countries.
That is about the place where I stopped listening to the book, but I was amazed at what had occurred. A seeminly innocuous decision by the Thai government caused a cascade which ended up affecting the entire world.
I’m not yet ready to offer up a real opinion about this globalization. On the one hand, it’s getting worse and worse every day, with countries becoming very entangled in each other’s affairs. However, is there a way to put up controls and safety nets? Or would these controls do more harm than good? It wouldn’t be the first time something like that occurred. For example, tarriffs, which protect domestic goods from cheaper foreign goods, end up hurting the country trying to export its goods. In the early history of the US, these tactics led to economic wars that, in the long run, only hurt all players involved, including the country imposing the tarriffs.
As I continue to listen to the book, I will be able to offer up a more informed opinion. If the book continues to be as exciting as these first few pages were, I may be blogging about it quite a bit more.
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